Page 454 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

escape from his miseries, which no one would envy him—
save his comrades. The heart of Dawes had been filled with
horror at a deed so bloody, and he had, with others, com-
mented on the cowardice of the man that would thus shirk
the responsibility of that state of life in which it had pleased
man and the devil to place him. Now he understood how
and why the crime had been committed, and felt only pity.
Lying awake with back that burned beneath its lotioned
rags, when lights were low, in the breathful silence of the
hospital, he registered in his heart a terrible oath that he
would die ere he would again be made such hideous sport
for his enemies. In this frame of mind, with such shreds
of honour and worth as had formerly clung to him blown
away in the whirlwind of his passion, he bethought him of
the strange man who had deigned to clasp his hand and
call him ‘brother”. He had wept no unmanly tears at this
sudden flow of tenderness in one whom he had thought as
callous as the rest. He had been touched with wondrous
sympathy at the confession of weakness made to him, in a
moment when his own weakness had overcome him to his
shame. Soothed by the brief rest that his fortnight of hospi-
tal seclusion had afforded him, he had begun, in a languid
and speculative way, to turn his thoughts to religion. He
had read of martyrs who had borne agonies unspeakable,
upheld by their confidence in Heaven and God. In his old
wild youth he had scoffed at prayers and priests; in the hate
to his kind that had grown upon him with his later years
he had despised a creed that told men to love one anoth-
er. ‘God is love, my brethren,’ said the chaplain on Sundays,